Well, I was not quite right. Hero does have a story, and it’s reasonably engaging, although seems to be an allegory which says that the end justifies the means. Visually beautiful, well, yes, got that bit right. Originally published on my old blog site.

Lots of art this week. First Blowup, being shown to mark Antonioni’s death (he was the director; fraid I’d never heard of him). Not a bad film. Wikipedia says that it "does not follow a conventional narrative structure", which I interpret as it not having a plot. Most of the plot seems to involve unlikely situations which allow for lots of strange angles and artistic shots, with 60s stylism to the fore. Still, the shots were very artistic, which was fun in itself. It’s not aged well, but it’s an interesting historical view. The Alvin Ailey dance company played at the Royal Theatre. It started off with a dark and meaningful dance about something, backed with orchestral music and then moved towarded a more dancable (er…) gospel set which got everyon…

Trying this out today. Not working either. I think at heart it’s my SMB configuration that is hosed rather than anything else. Originally published on my old blog site.

Now trying out autofs — the cifs filesystems don’t umount cleanly and autofs seemed like a nicer solution. Anyway, it looks like it’s working — autofs and mount all show the right thing — but I can’t cd into the directory. One of the things that I liked most about windows, which I can’t get to work under linux is start or from cygwin cygstart — which does all the right things with paths. Basically, it means "do the right thing with this file"; so start hello.txt will open hello.txt in Notepad or Emacs. On linux nautilus . works for directories but fails for files. Originally published on my old blog site.

Today was no end of hassle as I tried to get SMB shares mounted — the problem here seems to be that it needs IP numbers; then I tried to get latex installed — tetex is broken, as you need to put the main directory in TEXINPUTS, TeXLive just doesn’t install; and finally a recurring problem with vmware server which I think I have solved (removing vmware player services), but won’t know till the reboot. Hmmm. Originally published on my old blog site.

I took the advantage of having not being in the middle of anything as a result of coming back from holiday to move to linux, and am not typing this on Ubuntu. A few things to do yet — not least getting my website generation working, so this blog may appear several days after I type it. It’s all gone reasonably smoothly so far. Took lots of running of unison. Got my email running today; some 350 mails in main box, with around 1000 in total (plus another 2000 spam). Hmmm, lots to read. Originally published on my old blog site.

This is England is a classic British film; set sometime in the past, funny and full of gritty realism. It’s beautifully shot, evocative and moving; although, it’s about a bunch of violent racist skin heads, there is no real black and white (er, if you know what I mean). The film is warm and engaging. I guess, though, I was always going to be a sucker for this. How could I not be moved? It was set against the backdrop of the Falklands, unemployment, Thatchers England. It was set against part of my childhood, set against my political awakening. So, I didn’t enjoy, but I am glad to have been. It’s important to remember that time. Originally published on my old blog site.

And permalinks added. I wonder if I can get myself named as a DOI or LSID authority, then I can immortalise my thoughts forever into the future. Originally published on my old blog site.

I notice that the CBI are suggesting that the government should provide £1000 bursaries for students starting science programmes. Don’t get me wrong, I think that this would be a good thing, but I can’t help but wonder: would it not make more sense to just pay them more? After all, a bursary is a course, and salary is for life. Originally published on my old blog site.

In a fit of paranoia, I have decided to add a disclaimer to the bottom of all my web pages, including this one. This is probably unnecessary and legally pointless, but no one can blame me for not trying. For my next trick, I was thinking of fiddling with my stylesheets; quite a few dim-witted friends of mine have asked me whether I was colour blind, not aware that this the clash of colours is, in fact, a deeply satirical comment on society, the role of education and the monarchy in the 21st century. Suggestions for other possibilities in the colour palette are accepted. Originally published on my old blog site.